Pachyderm Pranks

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Elephants are renowned for their intelligence, their ability to use tools, and their complex social behaviors, including mourning and burying their dead.

Now, a new study adds a surprising twist: They can use hoses to shower themselves and even to play pranks on each other.

That conclusion arose after a research team closely documented the impressive and creative hose-handling skills of Mary, a 54-year-old Asian elephant at the Berlin Zoo in Germany.

Dubbed “the queen of showering,” Mary skillfully manipulated the hose with her trunk to spray water over different parts of her body. She even used a lasso-like technique to reach her back and adjusted her grip to clean her legs.

“Elephants are amazing with hoses,” Michael Brecht, a senior author of the study, said in a statement.

But Mary wasn’t the only star of the show.

Anchali, a mischievous 12-year-old elephant, often interrupted Mary’s showers by kinking or clamping the hose to cut off the water. Over time, she became more adept at these tricks, developing a technique researchers called a “trunk stand,” where she used her weight to flatten the hose.

Brecht and his colleagues remain unsure about what Anchali’s motivations were, although they quipped that she was probably “trying to sabotage Mary.”

“Does she think it’s funny? I think it’s very funny, but we really don’t know,” Brecht told the Guardian.

Playfulness, curiosity, or perhaps even spite – since Mary has occasionally been aggressive toward Anchali – could all be at play.

The study also revealed that elephants show “highly lateralized” behaviors, favoring one side of their body depending on whether they are left- or right-trunked. Mary, a left-trunked elephant, preferred to shower the left side of her body.

Lucy Bates, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth who wasn’t involved in the study, said the findings are a reminder of how much we still have yet to learn about animals.

“I am convinced that elephants – and possibly lots of animals – do all sorts of interesting things that we often miss, or dismiss as one-offs or anecdotes,” she told Science magazine.